Lina Selander & Emma Hartman – Limited edition exhibition book

Limited edition book for exhibition of Swedish artists Lina Selander and Emma Hartman, curator Dobz O'Brien. Conceived and produced in response to Rory Prout's essay on the occasion of Speculative Fictions Exhibition at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Ireland. Designed in Skibbereen, edition of 80 hand-crafted in Cork City by a team of many.

A Bookmaking Workshop with the Sherkin Island Poets

In the winter of 2013, a group of Sherkin Islanders, along with artist Tess Leak (centre front), undertook an adventure together: to create a collection of haiku poems inspired by life on the Island in all its forms and complexities. Traditional Japanese Haiku are three line poems with seventeen syllables and are, according to a member of the group, “like little islands” themselves. 

A limited edition of 50 books containing a small part of the collection and was made at a day-long workshop by the hands of the Haiku-Island Poets in their community centre, November 2014. I helped with the setup and layout aspects but was highly impressed at their steady hands on the production line, cover Haiga and beautiful marbled end papers the poets brought to the edition.

The project was kindly supported by the Sherkin Island Development Society and the Cork Education and Training Board. Many thanks to Aisling Moran (Development Officer for Sherkin) and to all the Haiku Island Poets.

Offset 2012 - Interview with Stefan Sagmeister – and whether or not he is design's Oprah Winfrey

I'm just back from an inspiring weekend at design conference Offset, which was held at Dublin's Grand Canal Theatre. The talks are still percolating in the subconscious. Themes that were interesting for me personally seemed to be summed up in this interview. The ever-learning Stefan Sagmeister meets my first creative director Ciarán O'Gaora (zero-g). It touched on the pursuit of happiness, being a graphic designer, maintaining creative longevity, productivity and making time for personal work. Yes, thats all in there somehow. So below is what he looked like just *before* speaking to "that girl" mentioned, and just to prove that yes, I was there, you can see a terribly boring shot of everyone waiting for the interview to start... his head is behind the guy with the glasses, bun and beard, who is Ciarán.

@weloveoffset
Offset weblink

Tripping in Surreality – 'Art Lit Feed' on tumblr

Bouncing round the Indie Art Lit Feed and grazing on hippy tripped out universes. And then the whole tumblr rabbit-hole for that matter. These images are from there but originally: 

Chrissy Angliker (via booooooom)

Pierre Botardo (via 2headedsnake)

James Dawe (via 2headedsnake)

Unknown (via whitemoonstone)

Ms. Neaux Neaux (via feru-leru)

Follow it here @ArtLitFeed

Dublin Contemporary 2011 – Splashy or Splishy?

Went along to this International Art Fair at the weekend. Heavy rain had finally cleared and a Sunday afternoon's ruckus of children were blotted over the first floor of Earlsfort Terrace, an abandoned university campus. The paraphrased theme is Terrible Beauty—Art, Crisis, Change: Taken from William Butler Yeats’ famous poem “Easter, 1916”... suggesting "art’s underused potential for commenting symbolically on the world’s societal, cultural and economic triumphs and ills".

Walking through, the marie-celesteness of the venue would normally be just my cup of tea, but for some reason, I found it all distracting. Maybe that's because I'm not a nostalgic Dubliner. Rather, I must be a curmudgeon and regressing to white-cube preferences. Anyhow! I kept feeling that I was in a student graduation show, because every piece had it's own dreary little room with sockets and bare-faced concrete. Some were transformed wonderfully and completely, while others weren't, it seemed to depend on something arbitrary.

Attention deficiency led to constant forgetting of the theme... so it's just as well I brought a camera, because otherwise, an unreflective impression might have been misleading.

The stuff I liked in-situ was mainly the video work because "I got it" in terms of something political-social-surreal-challenging-ish. Chen Chieh - Jen's Empire's Borders was a series of interviews with regular Taiwanese people who simply wanted to go on holiday to the States. They were required to go through humiliating interviews at the embassy to get the visa, but were rejected for no known reason. Loved Niamh O'Malley's Quarry – a projection of stoney visuals onto a black canvas... like a painting, but alive.

Alejandro Almanza Pereda – Horror Vacuii

The static spatial pieces that struck me however were the disturbing / textual / strange ones. Floating barbed wire, the terrifying hairy tit, painfully hand-rendered magazines and a giant slimey octopus...

Amanda Coogan's live piece – Spit Spit, Scrub Scrub – featuring herself and two other performers in a room dribbling onto their huge blue satin gowns – for three hours!! Really, no image could do justice to that.

Dan Perjovschi's Dublin Drawings in the Annex were probably the most communicative piece on theme for me: simple social commentary with humour. ah!

Brian Duggan's Ferriss Big Wheel model, is a replica of one in the Russia town of Pripyat which was evacuated during the Chernobyl disaster. Abandoned promises of fun and frolic... that spooky vibe.

Fernando Bryce – Comoedia, Brian Duggan – The Short Term Evacuation, Wilfred Preto, Mark Clare – Democracity

Alan Butler – Painting of a photo from a news report of a suicide at Foxconn, Shenzhen, China, 2010; painted in an oil painting factory in China

Dan Perjovschi – One of countless ditties in The Dublin Drawing

Teresa Margolles – City's Keys 

Maarten Vanden Eynde – The Earth seen from the Moon

Siobhan Gibbon – Neoplasm

Mark Cullen – Towards Superconnection, James Deutscher – Oh, na, na, what's my name? Oh, na, na, what's my name?, Dan Perjovschi – The Dublin Drawing, Installation in the medical library (Artist anyone?)

Overall, I left without that furious sinking exhaustion that happens after "Art", maybe because of the lack of text information around the place, or maybe because it was all so cosy and derelict. Hmm.

Anyone else seen it and have thoughts on this?

Johnathan Harris – Personal Geography

Lovely idea and beautifully executed...

Lead Pencil Studio – Empty Billboard

This is so beautiful on every level: crafted, smart, mysterious and monumental. Lying on the US-Canadian border, this is high-art publicly funded(!?) Lead Pencil's Daniel Mihalyo explains:

Borrowing the effectiveness of billboards to redirect attention away from the landscape... this permanently open aperture between nations works to frame nothing more than a clear view of the changing atmospheric conditions beyond.

Via Suzanna Labarre at Co. Design

Ai Wei Wei - Sunflower

"I always think art is a tool to set up new questions"

'Sunflowers' officially opens today in the turbine hall, Tate Modern. I loved the simplicity. You can just hang out on the millions of porcelain hand-made sunflower seeds, make angels, play with the seeds, watch the world go by... The documentary is worth seeing - Chinese production in a small traditional town with long heritage of hand crafted ceramics. Sunflowers are symbols of the chinese during the Cultural Revolution, Mao was the sun.

Article on ME magazine

Julie Gough – Time and Space and Memory

At the moment she's in Ireland researching her roots and no doubt making something... Here are some images from Tasmania

Cork Culture Night 2010

The whole city threw open its doors. Artists' studios, churches, archives, city hall, galleries, even the synagogue. I guess it was Ireland's version of the White Night, but not for the whole night. So I took myself and my push bike across one side of town and dropped into a few places.

Festivities on the River Lee to kick off Culture Night

Billy Foley explains his paintings, in The Cork Artist's Collective

Figuring out Julie Gough's work in The National Sculpture Factory

Sean McCarty (Sculptor), Happy Man, Miriam (my art teacher from back in the day) and Eilís O'Connell (Sculptor)

Rory Tangney's work in progress sketches in The Golden Section Studios

Helena O'Donnell's space in The Golden Section Studio

Trad session in Sin É.

Alice Guillier - Pop-ups

via heystudio

Beste Miray Dogan — Mapenvelop

Oh I do love an indexhibit site. I do I do. There's always something wonderful to discover in a template place, that is filled lovingly. So, via something called 'radar' in tumblr, I stumbled onto this beautiful and witty envelope. Neat idea!

Beste Miray Dogan

Live Now – A community of happiness

www.welivenow.org via grainedit